This rambling, discursive piece from 2013 is meant to provide some context for how and why I entered graduate school. It was written about a year before I entered Georgetown, at a particularly low point in my life. The aim was to name the unnameable, to give some sense of what despair looks and feels like.

I have lost my thread, my story, my narrative arc. It’s gone, and I can’t live – or can’t live very well – without it. I haven’t always been happy, but I’ve always been able to stand back a step or two, and give what was happening, or what had just happened, a name, apply a label, make it funny, represent the situation, rope all the tangents, lasso them under a tidy heading.

During the Stanton Street Years, snow came in the gapped window of the top-floor apartment, the toilet froze, cockroaches were so numerous you learned to kill them barehanded, transgender prostitutes on the dark sidewalk below performed a nightly amusement, dealers hawked their wares on weekend afternoons in the narrow strip of concrete that much later came to be called a park.

There was the Almost Dropping Out of High School Period (“Write this paper on the Brothers Karamazov by Thursday or you won’t graduate”), and the Wonderful First Job Era, featuring the Crazy Boss Who Taught Me Everything and Wore White on Wednesdays (a white guy from Indiana practicing … was it candomblé? was it santeria? was it voodoo?). Gay, in the halcyon post-Stonewall, pre-HIV years, the Boss went off to the docks to have orgiastic anonymous sex, leaving me, so young, so proud in my thrift-shop dresses, delighted to be learning what would become my trade, in awe of what was going on around me).

Unpleasant to remember is the Very Bad Chicago Interlude, in which our heroine belatedly goes off to college only to take to her bed for 17 hours at a stretch until a character named Phil Epstein intervenes (not a boyfriend, not even a very close friend – what could his motivations have been?). This Phil brings said heroine to a building at the other end of campus with a sign reading, “Student Mental Health Center.”

And then there was the We Are Sluts and We Are Proud Moment (cf. the Stanton Street Years), in which my friends and I proudly added to the proverbial notches on the proverbial belt with subchapter titles (the Guy Who Lived Over One of those Indian Restaurants on Sixth Street; the Guy With the Fantastic Arms who Kept His Sleeveless White Undershirt on While We Did It; the Guy Who Lived on the Corner of Bowery and Houston and Had the Most Bizarrely Tiny Prick, the Guy I Hated Since High School But Slept With Anyway After Doing Too Much Coke).

Who, pray tell, can forget the Almost-Paradise-on-Earth Epoch, living in a small town in France, when every trip to the hardware store, the dentist, the supermarket was a wild meandering voyage of discovery, in spite of the fact that this was not Provence, the sun did not always shine (franchement, it was gray for a good three months of every year), the tomatoes were not always ripening in a bowl on the table in the garden. But the bread was extraordinary and – combined with the challenge of teasing the nouns and verbs into making the meaning I sought ­– created an utterly absorbing story line.

Some of the episodes, chapters, vignettes may have had more intricately embroidered background than others (the singe-ing, chemical smell of the neurological ICU in My Father Had a Stroke Just Three Days After I Moved Back to the US); some showcased more interesting characters than others (my Grandma Ida, with her central-casting Russian Jewish immigrant’s accent, sitting on the ground to pick luscious summertime strawberries when she, well into her ’80s, could no longer support the crouch, the bend, the lean of strawberry picking in The House That We All Loved So Much); some had more high drama than others (ah, the early days of CBGB; ah, the family drama in which protagonist morphs into raving lunatic-banshee, screaming in front of hated brother’s bewildered little kids, also from The House That We All Loved So Much). But no matter their differences, the important thing is this: Each had its respective title, each had its own individual arc.

But I no longer have that. It’s gone, vanished, disappeared, poof. Narrative no more.

I hear that some people don’t crave story. Buddhists, who can just be. People so busy and tired and broke, they merely place one foot in front of the other, no time or energy or habit of mind to look for meaning.

But I, distinctly non-Zen in being and approach to life, don’t look for meaning, for perspective, dramatic arc, narrative thread. I need it. I must have it, in order to go on. I never had any idea just how necessary it was until, one day, it just wasn’t there. The presence of an absence, as we used to say back on the Lower East Side, in the days when we were all obsessed with Michel Foucault and the TV show, “Thirtysomething.” (Odd combo, but true.)

Julian Barnes, and before him, Frank Kermode, talk about the sense of an ending. Me, I need the sense of a middle. Penelope, she wove, secretly unraveling each day’s production, during her wait for Ulysses’ return. I would never unravel the day’s weaving. I would stare at it, consider it, give it a name. Ariadne had a spool of thread in the labyrinth, she and Theseus used it to find their way. I need a thread, to connect one episode to another, to make sense of the middle. Hansel and Gretel tried to use crumbs to find their way out of the forest. I too need to make a trail of crumbs, one miette (why is it that French words always sound so much prettier than their English equivalents?) leading to another to another to another, until the way out of the woods is found, the search adds up, the summing-up chapter title is created.

Even at my most melancholic, when I found myself, really for the first time, backed against a wall, no obvious way out, living back in my home country, in a place I did not want to be, where a trip to the hardware store was not only not an adventure but caused me to burst into such shaking sobs that I could barely see through the windshield to steer the car: Even then, I had words, a name, for this portion of my narrative arc.

– – –

Early on in my life, I found the career in which I worked for decades. But then – suddenly, it seemed, although of course it wasn’t sudden at all – after  I’d achieved a certain degree of seniority, a certain mastery of craft, the vagaries of technological change and the almighty market decreed that this work was available to me no longer. And too, right about this time, I realized, after many years of hedging and circumlocuting and equivocating, that my marriage was no longer tenable, viable, livable. And, worse still, to do anything about the situation would without a doubt break the heart of my beloved son, born so late in the day, just under the wire, as the gates were closing (oh yes, there is that chapter as well, in which, after a lifetime of vowing never to have a child, our heroine is seized with a sudden, violent, overarching desire to do the parenting thing). Then, presto, all of a sudden, the facts, statistics, numbers, studies I had marshaled for a work project about the economic fallout for women after a divorce, came crashing down, in an all-too-personal way. I was trapped, no obvious way out, no clear means of egress, no staring-you-in-the-face solution.

I began daydreaming a nightmare, I imagined it down to its most vivid particular. Me, bundled in the voluminous rags of a 1970s street person, huddled against the wind and cold, my few belongings in a broken-down metal supermarket shopping cart, standing (maybe crouching, maybe sitting on the steps) in front of the church at the corner of 79th Street and Broadway in New York. How many times had I passed that church, on the way down into the subway, on the way to buy the newspaper or a magazine at the newsstand right there on that corner, and yet I didn’t know – still don’t know – the church’s denomination. Was it Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran? I would have noticed and remembered if it had been Seventh Day Adventist, Baptist, Pentecostal.

And so this became a chapter as well: When I Was Scared of Becoming a Bag Lady.

I thought that was a scary spot on the graph, perhaps an emotional nadir in the narrative arc. But it turned out there was worse to come, much worse, the most terrifying of all: the scaly monster I hadn’t known existed, lurking in the closet, the dead raccoon’s tail sticking out from under the bed in the cold house, the stranger following you down the dark deserted street, no bodega open, no one around, no one at all. This, what I never could have imagined: No crumb, no thread, no weaving, no arc, no story, no sense. Where was the director to highlight the drama, show me the way, name this chapter?

No pathos, no bathos, no humor, no sarcasm, no distance, no angle, no take, no frame. No thread, no crumb. No sense of an ending, no way forward. Just absence.

And so, here is my mission, my assignment, my mandate, the thing I have to do, the work: Start again. Find the story. Tell the tale. Create the arc.